Narrative Level

The narrative level aims to engage the learner in a continuous story, where he is able to act and affect the unfolding of the story. The narrative level consists of two components: a story generator and a world model.

4.3.2.1 The Story Generator

As mentioned previously in Subsection 2.7.4.2, there are different types of narrative; linear, branching and dynamically generated narrative. Both branching and dynamically generated narrative allow various experiences to the user. However, it can be seen that the branching narrative drawback lies in constraining the user’s agency and that of the dynamically generated narrative lies in the difficulty of tracking the learning process.

Section 4.3 Proposed Architecture 63

For the purpose of this research, the edugame story should allow high agency to the user and in the same time allow tracking the user’s actions when an educational theme is presented. Allowing high user agency and tracking the learning process in parallel seemed as the bottle neck in designing the story generation module. A solution to this problem can be seen in the integration of more than one narrative technique in order to balance the user agency and track the learning process during the play time course. Planning, such as STRIPS, can be used to dynamically generate different stories at run time based on the student’s actions. First goal achieved through presenting an engaging story to the student. In the same time the story generator should be able to integrate more structured narrative, (see figure 4.3) that employs educational material without affecting the student’s experience. This actually allows the achievement of the fifth goal: ‘integrating educational material to game story’. It will be also useful to allow the agents inhabiting the world to employ reactive planning in order to appear more realistic and believable.

This allows the partial achievement of the second design goal: ‘sufficient stimulation to engage learners in knowledge discovery’. An example of the world model representa- tion is as follows:

place(‘‘house’’) place(‘‘library’’) character(‘‘Gina’’) character(‘‘Judy’’)

char at(‘‘Gina’’, ‘‘house’’) friend(‘‘student’’, ‘‘Gina’’)

personality(‘‘Gina’’, ‘‘honest’’, ‘‘not responsible’’)

4.3.2.2 The Presentation Module

The presentation module handles the flow of information and monitors the interactions between the user and the system and vice versa. Keller’s ARCS model (Mergel 1998) has been chosen for its suitability to games in designing the edugame interface in a way that helps to partially address the sixth design goal: ‘edugame design should be based on learning theories’. This module can address the four classes of the ARCS’s model: Attention, Relevance, Confidence/Challenge, and Satisfaction/Success (Mergel 1998) to enrich the module’s design. Gaining and keeping the learner’s attention can occur through the presence of a graphical interface and non-playing characters. Relevance could be provided through supplying a world similar to the student’s real world by allowing them to interact with similar situations that might face them in real life. The presentation module should provide a facility that allows the student to view the history of the game

64 Proposed Model and Architecture Chapter 4

play in order to help with self reflection and self assessment. For example, reasoning about previous actions that lead to the current situation (e.g., losing a friend). It is also valuable to present and engage the learner in activities with unexpected ends, which raise his/her curiosity and lead to satisfaction.

4.4

Chapter Summary

This chapter provides the goals set for having successful educational games and gives an idea about how these goals were tackled by the proposed architecture. Achieving the first goal: ‘the presence of an engaging story to the student’ has been achieved directly through the presence of dynamic interactive narrative. Whereas, goal 6: ‘the design should be based on learning theories’ has been achieved through considering Gagn´e’s nine events and Keller’s ARCS model. In addition, goal 5: ‘the educational material should be integrated with the game story’ has been achieved through presenting the teaching moments to the learner in narrative form as part of the main game story. Moreover, goal 8: ‘providing students with opportunities for personal discovery’ has been addressed through the problem solving of the teaching moments and the exploration of the game environment.

Other goals were achieved by considering them in more than one element in the design, for example Goal 2: ‘the edugame should have enough stimulations to engage learners’ has been considered in the teaching moments design by providing curiosity that helps to engage the learner and has been also considered in the world model through the presence of non-playing characters. Goal 3: ‘provide optimum level of challenge’ was achieved through the presence of a student model that provides adaptation to the stu- dent’s level and the existence of various teaching moments that attempt different levels of the student’s skills. Goal 7:‘the edugame should include one or more intelligent tu- toring component’ has been tackled through the presence of an intelligent tutor modules represented in the domain model, student model and pedagogical model. Goal 4: ‘the relationship between the educational needs and game elements’ was addressed through the presence of non-playing characters that inhabit the game world and help in supplying the educational material. In addition, the proposed design couples learning and gaming where game levels were achieved through progressing in the learning process. A summary on how the goals have been achieved by the various edugame components is shown in figure4.5.

It can be perceived that achieving goal 6: ‘the edugame design must be based on learning theories’ can contribute to achieving goal 10: ‘the educational outcomes should

Section 4.4 Chapter Summary 65

Figure 4.5: Summary of goals achievement

be measured according to Bloom’s taxonomy’ at the evaluation phase. Goal 9: ‘the developed edugame should be evaluated versus games aspects and its ability to provide educational outcomes’ can be also achieved in the evaluation phase by verifying the implemented prototype to Gee’s games aspects.

The proposed architecture in this chapter manages to incorporate hybrid narrative generations and an intelligent tutor that can track the students’ actions and assess them. A frame representation has been selected to structure the domain model as it offers clear visualization of the domain concepts and facilitates the pedagogical model job in choosing the appropriate educational content. A rule representation has been found useful in capturing the student’s knowledge and behavior. A model of how the intended edugame should work has been presented. The next chapter will show how the presented architecture will be used to implement an edugame prototype for the empirical study.

CHAPTER

5

Implementation

5.1

Overview

In the previous chapter, we proposed an architecture that was able to achieve the design goals set based on the literature and our view. General descriptions and expectations of each module have been displayed and discussed along with the considered choices. Thus far, this thesis has motivated rigorous empirical research on educational games, especially narrative based ones. The proposed architecture makes a contribution in the educational games area. The contribution has been shown in the integration of hybrid narrative and intelligent tutor to allow the presence of a continuous story and evolving agents. The integration addresses the learner’s agency versus tracking the learning process problem that exists in educational games. This chapter presents the implementation and the interaction between the different modules of AEINS and shows how the AEINS manages to engage, support and encourage the learner by considering his needs, strengths and weaknesses.